Since 1987, the Church of the Good Shepard — tucked away in a residential area off Packard Street — has been handing out an annual Award for Servant Leadership in Building a Beloved Community.

“It’s modeled after Martin Luther King Jr. and it’s someone who works in the community as a community servant,” Dale Magee, who served on the committee that chose the award winner. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

Community servants can come in all shapes, sizes and professions, and are not necessarily members of the church.

Reverend Herb Lowe, the pastor who developed the award, felt that more needed to be done to honor those who gave of themselves for the betterment of the community.

In the 25 years the award has been handed out, winners have included University of Michigan Environmental Justice Program founder Bunyan Bryant, the student group Students Educating Each other about Discrimination (SEED) and last year’s winner, Vincent York, who lectures on the history of jazz music in America at schools around the country.

“The common denominator we look for is someone who is working for the good of the community,” Magee said. “Someone who is trying to help people, working to help people.”

This year’s honoree, Dr. Bonita Neighbors, is a dentist and director of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry Community Dental Center — a unique gathering place in downtown Ann Arbor for those seeking dental care from across the socioeconomic spectrum.

“Our clinic serves everybody, and that is an important point,” Neighbors said.

“People often think we only see people with financial challenges, but the beauty of this model is that we treat everybody. I might have a University of Michigan professor in the waiting room right next to someone from the Delonis Center [shelter].”

In Neighbors’ previous job, she served a clientele that was decidedly more homogenous, a fact that troubled her deeply. Before taking over the Community Dental Center, Neighbors spent 22 years as a dentist in the Michigan prison system.

“In reality, the prison is a reflection of poverty or lack of access to services,” she said.

“You get the same population that you get when you’re working in the safety net medical world. Very few well off people go to prison. It’s mostly the poor.”

Neighbors, originally from Hillsboro, North Carolina, moved to Michigan with her husband shortly after finishing her undergraduate degree. After studying in the University of Michigan Dental School, she chose an entry-level job as a prison dentist because it paid more than the alternative, a teaching position at U-M.

“At that time, the prison system in Michigan was just coming off of a lot of prison unrest. There had been riots, and we were now under a court order to improve conditions including health and dental care for the inmates,” she said.

“So I came in at a time of change, which was very good because changes needed to be made.”

Coming from a middle-class African American family, working in Michigan’s prison system exposed Neighbors to a reality that she had not faced before.

“Just seeing how many people of color were incarcerated was very distressful, but I saw a chance to make a difference,” she said. “Once I started looking like that it became very meaningful work.”

Neighbors’ work at the prison quickly grew beyond just her own dentist’s chair as she worked to improve conditions for inmates. By the time she left in 2010, she was responsible for dental clinics in 23 prisons across the state. She said that each prison is now accredited through organizations that require a certain level of care for the inmates.

“The fascinating thing for me is that for poor folks it’s harder to give good coordinated care to the people who aren’t incarcerated than the people who are,” she said. “Everything’s right there when you’re in the prison world, the medical, mental and dental care.”

Working at the Community Dental Center is Neighbors’ way of attempting to bring that higher quality of care to all residents of Washtenaw County. The center accepts patients who are covered by dental plans and also works with the county, the United Way and other non-profit organizations to provide care for those who cannot afford it by themselves.

On Saturday, Neighbors worked a full nine-hour day at the center as part of a “Free day of care” in honor of MLK Jr. Day on Monday. On Sunday, she will accept her award at the Church of the Good Shepherd and give a guest-sermon sharing her vision with the congregation on what we can all do to make the community a better place.

Ben Freed is a general assignments reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Email him at benfreed@mlive.com and follow him on twitter at @BFreedinA2. He also answers the phone at 734-623-2528.